Non-Standard City-Planning

Frédéric Migayrou

What is architecture? How is everything that is organized around architecture specifically defined? Architecture, it is clear, is everywhere. It surrounds and encircles us. It forms a common frame. It is woven into an urban realm which no longer seems of a mood to stop–forever expanding networks and systems, gaining ground by the day ; nature turned into an area of production which has to be constantly recreated in order to be conserved. On the other hand, though, what about architecture and city-planning, when everything that is being erected every day is given over to the technical departments of local authorities, and design offices dealing directly with the corporate world ? It is now, and once and for all, no longer possible to argue in terms of territory, extension, boundaries, and limits, all of which help us to divide the world into an urban realm–the world with an extreme physical and human density–and an outer, independent territory, organized in accordance with the laws of another economy. The urban realm seems to have taken possession of the world, going beyond any notion of territoriality, growing into every manner of exchange system, exceeding the material nature of what is constructed and being continually reconstructed, commensurate with a simultaneity and intensity of exchanges. What is architecture, when the structuring of the public place outstrips the objective reality of what is constructed–the reality of buildings and transport system ? The urban is no longer content with just the city. The city is merely one factor of density in a fabric of an unprecedented complexity which is continually redistributing the logic of the social, the economic, and the political. So throwing down the word : city-planning is thus tantamount to becoming involved in the game of a kind of incompatibility ; it is still talking about the city, and its development models ; it is holding in reserve the idea of a relationship to the ground, to the foundation which seems denied by the on-going growth of cities, and by the spontaneous appearance of megalopolises which no longer owe anything to historical sedimentation. City-planning is inseparably linked with territory, it is a store of knowledge that is part of geography, and instrumentalized by many additional maps and surveys and plans.

This legacy of a military mastery of space still seems to be the preferred tool of a hermeneutics of urban arenas. Analysing the sedimentation and layering of the constructed, the architecture of networks and systems, and the historical interweave of plots and parcels invariably presupposes, when one steps back, the availability of the free plan, the plan that inextricably links the control of space with political power. The endless space of modern rationality, the space that has, quota-like, set the shape of all exteriority since Kant, has once and for all done away with traditional understandings of an anthropocentric space. The world has given in to rational cosmologies, it is no longer a closed realm, it opens out on to a limitless extension, a pure form that permits every sort of measurement and geometrization. The metaphors of the city which still punctuate the Discourse on Method have given way in the Kantian discourse to a definitive incompatibility, where architecture fails to represent the rational idea of an open totality, stretching ad infinitum. If we stay with the status that Kant gives to nature, a world governed solely by mechanical laws, man's constructions seem like a manifestation of his finiteness, the successive sedimentation of the stages of a history of reason. The never defined hypothesis of a real transcendental city links up with the ideal of the free plan, and by turning the proposition inside out, by introducing the city as the place of history, Engels would make it the model for a diagram of development leading to the ideal of a classless society. For him, the critique of the great industrial cities of the 19th century is never the denunciation of an incoherent development, a continual chaos; rather, it corresponds to drawing up a report of the present, and taking cognizance of a state of affairs caught in the motion of historical mechanics. The city has an independent dynamic, it is a symptom of history and it would seem that any desire to intervene and develop must be relativized. The city and the urban have their own order, which is an on-going revelation of the jolts and moments of history. Any other analytical logic that does not comply with this inner need of time must founder in an inert materialism, or in the idealism of a utopian future. The currently very topical idea of a chaos of the urban world, and the idea of an anticipation and a projection of what a state of the future city might be, have been made subordinate, in advance, to this undeclared transcendental city.

The general extension of the urban space, the absence of any distinction between city and non-city, the increasing muddle between public domain and private space, and the standardization of the economic fabric, information networks and cultural values, all these factors of a diagnosis of the state of the world seem to respond directly to this status of a rational and continually expanding space. Can we simply give in to this reason of history which caused Engels to say that: "For the time being, the only task that falls to us is a simple social makeshift repair" (1) ? The conception of the public place, bequeathed by the Enlightenment, seems to fully achieve a modern form of the city based on a perpetual incompatibility with the real, which keeps individuals in the sphere of an on-going lack of authenticity. In its incestuous relationship with industry, architecture was the main vehicle of a standardization of the habitat, and, by extension, of all the city's functions. The calculations of reason and its far-reachingly liberating dimension ended up by mixing the restrictions of production and a modelling of urban life. Over and above the prophetic visions of someone like Franz Jourdain, who was perhaps the first to remain aloof from the paternalistic understandings of the 19th century, with his work Les habitations ouvrières (1902), modernism radicalizes the rationalist project by inverting the geometric logic of classicism, and by substituting the humanist balance of the body's proportions by the idea of a normative measurement. The 1929 C.I.A.M. (International Congress of Modern Architecture), where Ernst May raised questions about "minimum life", where Walter Gropius held forth about the sociological presuppositions on minimum housing, Victor Bourgeois on "the minimum dwelling", and Le Corbusier on "The minimum house", fully arrayed the principles of a new universality. City-planning is a recent science and it is still peculiar that, in clinging to the principles of the human establishment, it should appear when architects start to define the ingredients of a syntax. From the minimum dwelling to the "live-in machine", architecture has had to comply with standards which do not simply respond to the mass production of objects in accordance with given functions, but more openly to an optimization of the production processes associated with a development of services. Standardization and the overall extension of production standards respond directly to an expansionist desire for territorial mastery, where the industrial rationalism of the liberal economy intersects, in the end of the day without any contradiction, with the deployment of historical reason–the history of reason incarnate.

It is time to busy ourselves with a real archaeology of identity models which have run through the history of architecture and city-planning, which now seem to have become completely uniformed on a worldwide scale. The fight for the standard–the very one that set Le Corbusier, who, with his Maisons Citrohan (1920-23), attempted to systematically develop aesthetic and constructive standards, against Walter Gropius, who merely tried to define types forms, open to all manner of assembly, as if in a construction game–was settled by itself in the world of production. Type or standard, the architect's language has itself become industrialized and its basic material is now made up of a set of procedures which steer any implementation. It is industry that objectivizes the architect's language, beyond any kind of romanticism attaching to a specific expression, and, in taking the example of car production, Le Corbusier would seal the new order of praxis. "What is interesting in the goals set up by Gropius is the contribution to industrial production, the factor involving the perfection of standards, but what saddens us is to be bound to conclude that an art school is incapable of improving industrial standards and introducing standards–ready-made standards cannot just be ushered in" (2). Promoting the standard against the type, Le Corbusier stepped back from the idea of decorative art and became fully involved in the model of an endlessly growing city, to borrow the name of his famous museum project. With regard to the City for Three Million Inhabitants, Hans Seldmayr, then a young critic, "reproached Le Corbusier for once again using this age-old idea of emancipation and being completely subordinate to the problems of the 20th century, such as hygiene and traffic" (3). Hugo Häring, who was concerned with the city-planning concepts put forward by Le Corbusier and Hilberseimer, would speak out against this "geometric principle of a mechanical world", in order to usher back in the concept of urban organism and "cell", both more attuned to man's individual needs–terms which Hilberseimer would espouse when he moved away from Le Corbusier. Is there such a thing as a Le Corbusier Kantianism, or an unexpressed Marxism of this modernism that has never really admitted its rational end purpose?

These days, continuous, unilateral urbanness is an obvious fact, and the expected standardization is now in effect. Normalization goes beyond all predictions and forecasts, and the logical systems of trade and services have increased ad infinitum the number of labels and marks and brands, in the end creating the unity of a worldwide culture where a growing number of values now forms the new unity of a symbolic world being shared by one and all. This unexpected form of universality has taken on the form of globalization, the reign of an undivided economy which is no longer even the object of any political or ideological debate. Saskia Sassen and Manuel Castells have greatly emphasized this new fracture which splits the world into a network of global, interconnected cities, siphoning off almost all forms of trade, and a secondary, almost indeterminate realm, which remains a mere resource, an availability, a potentially usable deposit where one may find, willy-nilly, raw materials, human resources, and tourist sites. How is this public place to be described? How is it to be defined over and above any spatial distinction? This question goes beyond the age-old separations that used to differentiate between centre and outskirts, city and country, western world and third world, and which still built borders and nations. How is a city to be built for six billion inhabitants–this is the ultimate question which goes beyond any idea of territorial settlement, and definition of identity. Confining the architect's work to that of a building process, a construction that invariably presupposes an availability of space, and turning architecture into an unambiguous art of space, is to stay at the hub of a contradiction which has borne along the whole history of modernism. It is time to come directly to grips with this hidden ontology, which is still trying to pin architecture down close to a foundation whose transcendental value is inaccessible to it–a Hegelian pyramid, a Heideggeresque Greek temple, a Marxist city. Paul Virilio put it in a masterful way : "This geodesic faculty of defining a unity of time and place for activities now clashes openly with the structural capacities of means of mass communications" (4). Nowadays, space is dimensionless, it no longer involves measurement, it is being constantly redefined in tune with our technological capacities of configuration.

Repeated attempts to redefine the modern space have all turned out to be illusory, and the ceaseless redefinition of a more adequate urban space, more available to human uses and functions, have invariably renewed the presupposition of an available spatial realm, and a more or less agreed geometrization of space. The rational city-planning of the C.I.A.M. meetings has actually been replaced by the dynamic of Team X which, in trying to transform socio-cultural models into a spatial reality, in the end became enmeshed in a geometrism of another kind. The use of grids, proliferations, more dovetailed and multi-purpose networks, the accumulation in complex systems of modular units, otherwise put, clusters, all have always stemmed from a logic involving the application of a procedure that invariably presupposes a prior reification of the chosen context. Here again, mastery of space and the implementation of the architectural project and the city plan were always inseparable from an economy of standards. Space is put back together again in accordance with programmes that people try to redefine with regard to "motifs", and "new motifs of association" (5), which sidestep the traditional organization of built-up urban areas. The most creative aspect of the Team X contribution lies, undoubtedly, in this initial merger between form, space, and the cultural social parameters which lead to the advent of the decisive concept of context. This normative factor, which is always being reintroduced, is further expressed in the works of the "tendenza". If an issue is indeed made out of space as a unilateral vehicle of architectural conception in favour of a historicist understanding of contexts, it is put back together in the form of a sociology which outlines new maps, and new territorial divisions. The abstract form of modern rationalism contrasts with a postmodern rationalism which speaks out against the utilitarianism of functionalist architecture, but which also attempts to define a normative basis borne along by historical values. When Carlo Aymonino tackles the rationalism of the Moderns, it is to denounce its abstraction, and its profoundly aesthetic dimension, to develop the dynamic of the historical contradiction in urban sedimentation. He endeavours to replace the abstract universality of modern standardization with the concrete universality of contextual standards. (6).

This claim of a complexity of urban phenomena does not, however, dodge other forms of renewing an external normativeness, which always presents the city like an object, like the outer realm of an intervention. We have lost count of the number of analyses which liken Colin Rowe's famous Collage City to Robert Venturi's De l'ambiguïté en architecture. The value of assembly, be it a passive statement of the way things are or the active challenge of a new kind of architectural writing, does indeed form the basis of a new analysis of the urban, but it remains passive, and clings to the primary idea of a heterogeneous composition. Even if Colin Rowe objects to the idea of a collective medium for these collages, a kind of "neutral backdrop", it re-introduces the ideas of an open field, derived from Karl Popper, an induced form of metaspatiality which presupposes collage. The city still seems limited to a passive morphology, an object that may be perfectly defined on the basis of its geographical limits, its form and its structure, and its particular history. Complexity is always analysed in relation to this morphological definition, be it formal–distinctions of elements–or dynamic–based on an update of all the possible interactions. This postmodern city-planning where : "The policies of universalism (or of abstract rights) have culminated in a policy of difference and recognition, where the decision depends more on the context than on any binary modernist logic" (7), nevertheless ushers back in the values of a withdrawn normative factor. Standardization gives way to typology, which fulfils the same normative functions and, in the final analysis, creates a new semantic universality of the city. Communicational space, as understood by Habermas, may respond directly to this conception of a postmodern urbanness, whose sense–a consensus that replaces the old universality of idealism–is never really defined.

Perhaps there is cause to reverse the proposal and turn complexity into a dynamic resource, by refusing it any particular analytical value. The urban is now established as a dynamic fabric of exchange, which comprehensively determines the physical realm of cities. Globalization is less an economic fact than a system of exchanges which, in real time, reconfigures all decisions, be they political or economic. Architects who have long been dispossessed of any capacity to intervene, now work at objectivizing the permanent scrambling of information, which fuels the public domain. Cities, these days, are thresholds, or ports, to borrow from computer vocabulary. A whole literature has swiftly come into being by making light of the supposed gap between a real public place, empowered by its laws, its norms, and its geography of nations organizing economic and political balances, and this intangible realm of the virtual, which blurs our age-old forms of logic to do with identity–virtual individuals caught in a social virtuality that renders the body immaterial,

financial move

ments, and symbolic and cultural exchanges. There is an amusing side to the plethora of titles which joyously proclaim the future development of cyberspace communities, cyberspace government, cyberpower, and cyberception. The cyber ideology introduces, in the negative, as it were, the idea of an otherness, a technological utopia which, needless to say, is illusory. It seems more important to understand how a new legal economy redefines the traditional identities of the political and economic world. "On the one hand, we can observe the advocates defined in terms of size and scale (individuals, institutions, players and persons involved, states, systems of states, international organizations and corporations and, last of all, the global). On the other hand, we can take a close look at all the situations and arenas in which these identities are produced. What is defined as bonds or links are these realms where relations between identities/players clash and collide and collude. From this angle, the globalization of communications is capsizing the whole field of identity creation"(8). Globalization is thus shifting all the old hierarchies and reforming an open field of decision-making, where each and every intervention is at once local and borne along by the limitations of the overall structure.

Behind the division of the world between those who have access to the various technologies and a third world which is banished from the new public place, today's urban domain, made up of an infinite number of transportation and communications systems, and a whole host of satellites which direct and control movements and flows, appears like an independent system, with no sovereignty, entirely supported by the laws of self-organization. The worldwide domain of the non-city, every manner of minority, infra-economies, everything that makes up the score of what seemed to be minor, is fully assimilated to this global realm, and increases the number of interactions with the decision-making hubs of globalization.

The global urban phenomenon appears to be an actual organism, as was prophesied in the 1960s by Christopher Alexander, who raised questions about the "nature of order" and advocated stepping up the number of local actions in order to steer urban strategies. "The local authority will reject all forms of physical masterplan; its essential performance consists in permitting the local authority to derive its organization not from a fixed projection of the future, but from a model system that acts as its own syntax" (9). We have lost count of the number of studies that have since endeavoured to apply the theories of complex systems and the models of biological organization to the urban arena. Behind the idea of a modelling of the "fractal city" (10), there is often a normativeness where the "models" seem to stand in for the old norms of geometric space. A rationality of disorder, buttressed by a form of neo-Kantianism, might, as in the epistemology of the Catastrophe Theory, reintroduce archetypes into the heart of urban modelling. By the look of the various issues being outlined by research architects in their incredible diversity, they are gathering together around the same established facts and the same postulates : - The emergence of an immediate culture and a pragmatism of urbanness, a new cognitivism. - The co-existence of many forms of localism in an unprecedented space-time pluralism. - A growing simultaneity of information exchanges. - A generalized recourse to models of morphogenesis and calculation. - A radical change in the relationships between the individual and politics and economics. The introduction of calculation as an actual production tool involves an active hermeneutics of the phenomenon of urban globalization which incorporates normativeness as so many possibles. Bernard Cache has stressed this definitive break with the rationalist models : "We are probably about to complete a tremendous twisting movement in philosophy, following which the consciousness will become a centre of interest, no longer as a place of reason, but as the place of a relentless unreason" (11). Globalization invites us to think in terms of a plurality of possible worlds, possibles which are being forever updated in a contradictory manner. It is imposing on architecture a hybrid, local, plural, praxis. It is time to invent a non-standard form of city-planning, a meta-constructivism of urban morphogeneses (12). It will have to be accompanied by an adequate political dimension, a policy of possibles which, with no hierarchies of scale, will be capable of dealing with all the states of citizenship in the global city, and reforming a pluralist community that eludes models of rationalist sovereignty (13).

(1) Friedrich Engels, La question du logement, Editions Sociales, 1957, p.47.

(2) Le Corbusier, "Pédagogie", in L'esprit Nouveau, n°19, décembre 1929.

(3) Winfried Nerdinger, "Standard et type : Le Corbusier et l'Allemagne 1920-27", in L'Esprit Nouveau, Le Corbusier et l'industrie, 1920-25, Ernst & Sohn, 1987, p.52.

(4) Paul Virilio, L'espace critique, Galilée, 1984, p.24.

(5) Alison & Peter Smithson, "CIAM 10 Projects",

in Architectural Design, Septembre 1955, n°9, p.268.

(6) Carlo Aymonino, L'abitazione razionale, Marsilio Editori, 1971, p.89.

(7) Nan Ellin, Postmodern Urbanism, Princeton Architectural Press, 1996, p.7.

(8) Jerry Everard, Virtual States, Routledge, 2000, p.7.

(9) Christopher Alexander, Une expérience d'urbanisme démocratique, Seuil, 1975, p. 34.

(10) Michael Batty, and Paul Longley, Fractal Cities, Academic Press, 1994, et Pierre Frankhaüser, La Fractalité des Structures Urbaines, Paris, Anthropos, 1994.

(11) Bernard Cache, "Objectile : poursuite de la philosophie par d'autres moyens", in Rue Descartes, n°20; Gilles Deleuze, Immanence et vie, PUF, 1998, p.157.

(12) Jean-Michel Salankis, Le constructivisme non-standard, Septentrion, Presses Universitaires, 1999.

(13) Chantal Mouffe, Dimensions of Radical Democracy,

Ed. Verso, 1992.